I have learned, over the years, that the best time to have major projects done
on your house is when you're not in it.

So when we needed our driveway replaced (it had gradually been turning into
gravel over the 16 years we've lived in this house), we knew the best time to
lose all access to our garage was when we didn't want it. In other words, while
we were at the beach.

This is not a good idea, however, unless you have a contractor whom you can
absolutely trust to make sure the job is done right. And by "right" I don't just
mean "up to professional standards." I mean your contractor has to
understand so perfectly how you want things to end up that you don't have to
be there every day to make sure somebody doesn't inadvertently make a
mistake you have to live with for the next few decades.

Tim Davis, of Tim Davis Home Improvement, is exactly that contractor. We
have been working with him now almost as long as we've had our house, and
he has proven over and over again that he cares more, and knows more, about
the results we want than we do! I don't know how he could do a better job
even if it were his own house.

First, he knows everybody, so we don't have to find subcontractors ourselves.
When we decided on stamped concrete, Tim called on Preston and Son
Concrete Contractors, Inc. But not before driving around Greensboro and
inspecting work they've done on other people's houses.

When they came over, we described what we needed, and then Tim and the
Prestons walked over everything with us, making counter suggestions. They
helped us avoid aesthetic mistakes, but they also listened carefully to what we
wanted to accomplish and made sure that everything would work as we wanted
it to.

We decided to make the driveway into two smooth lanes, with stamped
concrete giving the impression of stonework as trim between the lanes and
down both sides. This requires two separate pours of the concrete, since the
stamped concrete has one color added to it in the initial pour and then another
over the surface to give it visual texture.

To look good, this concrete treatment requires true artisans to do the work.
Mistakes can happen quickly, but they last forever.

And we've had our experience with very bad concrete contractors. When we
first moved into our house, we knew we needed more parking next to the
house, and I hate having cars parked in the driveway because that makes the
garage unusable. So we hired contractors to pour a parking pad.

This was before Tim Davis was supervising all our projects, so we had no idea
what to watch for. They poured it all in one continuous pad, and then they
were gone.

Within a year the entire surface had corroded away and it was rough and
stony. It did last, in that condition -- ugly as sin, but at least we didn't have to
park cars in the mud.

That isn't the whole story. The main driveway was the original one poured
when the house was built. It, too, had aged badly -- though not as quickly as
the parking pad!

It had been poured in two sections, each approximately twenty feet square.
But over time, cracks had appeared, dividing each half into halves, and it was a
constant effort to keep weeds from growing in them. And the surface had
begun crumbling a few years ago. Pretty soon it was going to look like ruins in
a war zone.

So when Preston and Son came over to see our situation and make their bid,
they pointed out that concrete should never be poured in sections that large.
Each slab should be no more than ten feet in every direction. In other words,
where our driveway had been poured as two slabs, we should have had eight.

And to demonstrate the truth of their point, our driveway had developed cracks
at about those ten-foot intervals, and none in between. Ten feet is not just a
good practice, it's a law of nature! Concrete will have a break every ten feet, so
if you want it to look nice, build it that way in the first place!

While we were gone on vacation, everything happened as planned. Tim Davis
took care of removing the trees and bushes that would interfere with the pour;
he was there with the Prestons every day, making sure that the plan was
followed. When they discovered that our driveway was not straight -- it angled
oh so very slightly in order to avoid a storm drain between our driveway and
mailbox -- Tim called us to make sure their solution was acceptable to us.

When we got home, we could not have been happier. We still had a week of not
using the garage, because the Prestons insist that no major weight (i.e., cars or
trucks) be put on the concrete until it has cured for seven days. But that was
a small price to pay, considering how beautiful it looked

We used concrete textures from Brickform -- the London Cobble pattern. And
we deliberately chose very muted colors. This is not Brazil, where bright-colored tilework everywhere is the norm. I loved that look when I lived there,
but bright colors would not have fit in with our neighborhood.

The idea of the stamped concrete is for it to be aesthetically pleasing. We're not
trying to fool anybody into thinking we have stonework. I suspect that real
stonework would have been way too expensive for our budget, and would not
have lasted as long, as a continuous surface, as this concrete will.

In fact, we had previously gotten bids for doing the driveway in stone, and the
price was double that of the stamped concrete. So not only do I get the
pleasure of having a very attractive driveway (for the first time in fifteen years!),
I also get the addition pleasure of knowing that I saved the equivalent of a year
of tuition and housing and meals for a student at the university where I teach!

We have learned our lesson about hiring contractors without knowing much
about them. Not that we haven't made mistakes even after the original
concrete pad disaster, but what homeowner who embarks on improvements
doesn't have a few horror stories?

The remodeler who puts your advance money for materials up his nose as
cocaine; the yard guy who takes your money for bringing in new soil for the
front yard and the next you hear about him is in the public notices in the
paper, where they tell you how long his sentence for possession and sale of
narcotics will be.

Over time, you do find a precious list of contractors you can trust. It's one of
the reasons why we can never move away from Greensboro. We now have
excellent people doing yard service, pond maintenance, irrigation, plumbing,
electrical, television, and even design and drafting.

And, of course, we have Tim Davis to make sure everything works together.

*

During the drought, I hated watching my plants die. There had been
rainstorms, they just didn't happen often enough or bring enough water to refill
our reservoirs. I kept thinking about how much water fell on our roof, only to
drain away down the spouts and into the ground.

The obvious solution is: Rain barrels!

I had never actually seen a rain barrel, of course. I grew up in suburbia! But I
knew they existed, mostly because my mother loved to sing the old song about
children quarreling:

I don't wanna play in your yard.

I don't like you anymore!

You'll be sorry when you see me

Sliding down our cellar door!

You can't holler down our rain barrel!

You can't climb our apple tree!

I don't wanna play in your yard

If you won't be good to me.

I had lived in several older neighborhoods with those slanting cellar doors
leaning up against the house, so I knew what that was about (though they were
always so paint-peely and splintery that no way would I risk my backside
sliding down them!). The rain barrels, though. I had to ask my parents what
those even were.

Then, a few years later, reading some interesting books about self-sufficiency,
rain barrels came up again. Lots of advice about how to make the water
drinkable, so you were no longer completely dependent on city water.

Well, that's an excellent idea, but in truth I like civilization and its benefits.
City drinking water gets purified in reliable ways that don't depend on me to
remember what to do at each step. I just pay a bill and turn the faucet. I
think that's an excellent system, especially now that we've learned from the
Romans' mistake and don't make our pipes out of nice, pliable, human-sterilizing lead.

However, I could see a real use for rain barrels to water our potted plants.
Plants in pots have nowhere to turn in a drought. They can't grow their roots
deeper in order to find hidden ground water. When draconian water
restrictions are in place, they wilt, they die.

So when I saw that Gardener's Supply Company, my favorite online source for
cool gardening stuff, was offering a nice selection of rain barrels, I decided on
their "flat-back" rain barrel. It's made of plastic but looks nice, it holds fifty
gallons, and because it's not completely round, but is flat across part of the
back, it sits up closer against the house and doesn't intrude so much into the
yard.

Because our house is L-shaped -- it's a corner lot, and our garage faces the
other street -- we actually have six locations where downspouts reach the
ground. We had never tried to measure which ones carried the most water, but
we made our guess and bought two rain barrels for what we thought would be
the best spots.

I made a deal with my brother-in-law, who is has good skills and very high
standards of workmanship. I would get him a couple of rain barrels if he
would install mine. We both think it was a great deal. But he opted for a
different model of rain barrel from Gardeners Supply -- and I'm not going to
swear mine is somehow the better choice. I just happen to like it.

The barrel has a screen on top so you don't get a lot of gunk coming down into
it. You have to cut off your downspout and then get a twisty portion to bend to
exactly where you want it to be, so it can pour down onto the screen. (Other
models have the downspout join in an airtight connection, but I don't feel any
particular need for that extra complication.)

My brother-in-law set the rain barrels up on thin concrete blocks. We soon
learned that you want another block or stone or bricks or cinderblock in front
of the rainbarrel's faucet, so you can set down a watering can and walk away
and do something else. The water comes out of the rain barrel without benefit
of the pressure that comes from having a tall water tower, so it can be a slow
trickle into the can.

And since the faucet is in the middle of the rain barrel, it can only let you get to
half your water. So they have another drain near the bottom of the barrel, to
which you can attach a hose and get the last dregs of water out.

One rain barrel was superbly placed where a couple of roofs join together, and
it filled completely in the first rainstorm. That means that at least fifty gallons
of water had previously been poured into the ground right by our foundation
with every storm!

The other rain barrel had a lot less roof to draw from -- it took two storms to
fill it.

I like the results well enough that I've ordered another barrel or two from
Gardener's Supply, to catch the water from the other likeliest downspouts and
get more from the roof of our house to serve the needs of our garden.

There's a gauge on the outside of each barrel, showing you exactly how full it
is. I can't tell you yet how long they last, but I will say that it's kind of fun to
use the water and know that I didn't have to pay the city for it.

Oh, but wait! I said that near my assistant, and she said, "What makes you
think you don't pay the city for the rain that falls on your roof?"

"Because that would be absurd," I said. "Ludicrous. Rain falls from the sky.
Why would I pay the city for that?"

She laughed -- not an evil laugh, mind you, but a rather rueful one.

Then she went to Greensboro City's website and got the facts. Here are the
websites if you want full information:

The idea is, I believe, that when you put a roof on your house and a driveway
and other pavement in your yard, that's water that does not get absorbed into
the ground and must instead be carried away by storm drains. So you're really
being charged according to how much of a burden you put on the city's storm
drain system.

The trouble is that most of the water that falls on our roof has been carried into
the ground by our rain gutters and downspouts. And because we live near the
bottom of what used to be a bog, our yard is quickly saturated with every heavy
storm, so that while our roof water goes underground, our lawn water flows
over the curb and into the street.

In short, their assumptions about where the water that flows into the storm
drainage system comes from are faulty. But whether we like it or not, we
actually do get charged for their estimation of how much water falls on our
roofs and driveways.

In other words, I've been paying the city for my roof water all these years, and
only now, with the acquisition of a few rain barrels, am I starting to get my
money's worth.

Then again, since my rain barrels are theoretically reducing the amount of
water that can possibly reach the storm drains, shouldn't they give me a
special rain-barrel discount?

Yeah, right, like that would ever happen.

The fact is, folks, you're already paying for the rain that falls from the sky onto
your roof. You might as well get a rain barrel and make use of some of that
water!

I don't know if the rain barrel "pays for itself." For me, the main attraction is
that in a drought, I can keep my plants happy for a bit longer than otherwise.
And if there were ever a dire emergency, like a polluted city water supply, I
could filter and boil what's in my rain barrels. I was a Boy Scout once. Why
not be prepared?